Edward Victor Cupero

Composer picture desired

Biography

Edward Victor Cupero (1878, Naples, Italy – 20 September 1939, Baltimore, Maryland) was an Italian-born American composer, cornetist and conductor.

Cupero immigrated to the United States with his parents at the age of three. When he was seven years old, he was sent back to Naples, where he reportedly studied at the Royal Conservatory. He returned to the U.S. at the age of 14 and began a musical career that included playing with various professional bands and later serving as the musical director of several different minstrel shows.

From about 1910 to 1915, he directed the band with George Evans' "Honey Boy" Minstrels. Following his work with this minstrel show, he returned to Baltimore where he conducted a number of different theater orchestras. In February of 1934, Cupero conducted the newly formed Albany (New York) Symphony Orchestra, and by the fall of that year he was organizing a band at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama. Two years later, the school newspaper reported that the (short and stocky) "rotund master of anything musical ... took over the music department and developed a band ... that compares favorably with any musical unit of similar size in the country."

- Program Note from score

Works for Winds

• Consolidated March
• Elk’s March, The (1903)
• Honey Boys on Parade (1914)
• Honey Boys on Parade (arr. Bourgeois) (1914/1998)
• Lyceum Stock March
• Zam Zam March (1914)

Resources

• Heritage Encyclopedia of Band Music. "E.V. Cupero." Accessed 13 November 2015.
• Smith, N. (1986). March Music Notes. GIA Publications: Chicago, Ill.